Presidential electors take the oath of office before casting ballots for President Obama and Vice President Biden at the Oregon state Capitol in Salem on Monday. / Jonathan J. Cooper, AP

by The Editorial Board, USA TODAY

by The Editorial Board, USA TODAY

When members of the Electoral College met in state capitals Monday to officially cast their votes for president, the vast majority of Americans hardly noticed.

That seemed only fair: Because of the Electoral College, President Obama and Mitt Romney barely noticed a vast majority of voters during the 2012 campaign.

Obama and Romney focused instead on fewer than a dozen battleground states, where the candidates spent billions on TV ads and visited incessantly.

So it goes every presidential election year, though not always in the same states, as candidates ignore the outcome of the popular vote in pursuit of the electoral votes. Under the system cobbled together by the nation's Founders, each state gets as many electoral votes as it has members of Congress. All but two states give all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the state's popular vote. It takes a majority of electors, 270, to win the White House.

America's most recent disenchantment with the Electoral College took root after the George W. Bush-Al Gore tangle of 2000. Bush lost the popular vote but captured the presidency - the third time in the nation's history such an unsatisfying split had occurred.

Critics of the current system have come up with two seemingly simple solutions: Dump the Electoral College and go to a straight, nationwide popular election for president, which requires amending the Constitution. Or, in the concept promoted by the National Popular Vote movement, do an end run around the Constitution with new state laws mandating that each state's electoral votes be cast for whoever wins the U.S. popular vote.

Both are seemingly appealing ideas - until you consider the downsides:

What if the popular vote were so close that a national recount was needed? The hideous experience of 2000 showed what a recount in a few counties in Florida looked like. Think about trying to recount 130 million votes.

A popular vote contest involving multiple candidates could produce a president elected with only, say, a third of the vote. Fringe groups and demagogues could act as spoilers. In the worst case, one might win. This could be addressed by holding a runoff between the top two vote-getters, a system common in other countries. But that would extend campaigns with a still-uncertain outcome.

Elections in which candidates need to blanket the entire country would set off an even more intense dash for dollars, leaving them even deeper in debt to special interests than they are now.

The National Popular Vote idea has other drawbacks. Say Texas were to approve the new system. What would happen the first time Texans realized that their state, which hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1968, was throwing all its electors to a Democrat because it had to follow the national popular vote? Chaos. Lawsuits. And calls to get rid of every state legislator who voted for this idea.

This isn't to say the current system is ideal. Plans to shift away from winner-take-all in each state, to a proportional allocation of electors, merit consideration. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill's description of democracy, the Electoral College might be the worst form of choosing a president, except for all the others.

Almost halfway

Eight states and Washington, D.C., have agreed to award their combined 132 electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote. The compact won't take effect unless it's ratified by states representing at least 270 electoral votes. Where it's approved, and the number of electors: